More stories from the world of rock and roll.
It’s a lot more fun to write about a band on the upswing, rising through the ranks, than it is at the end of the good times. The Titanic has sprung a leak, then another and another. Even the lifeboats are sinking. And the crew has swung from prideful to pitiful to mutinous.
What started out as a group of almost insanely overoptimistic people is now a ragtag little mob … some of whom hate each other’s very existence on the planet, but who are still dependent on each other. Bills to pay, food to buy. And in the case of many musicians … child support to shell out.
But it’s the normal sequence of events. Happens every day. Most bands have a limited shelf life. If you can get two or three decent years out of it, you’re probably average. And that’s if things go that well.
The famous bands who are around for decades are glued together by one thing: MONEY. Most of them have gargantuan bills, a lot of expensive food to buy. And their child support payments are so gigantic you often see them on the news.
They have the luxury of not even seeing the guy they despise until they step on the stage for two hours. Then their lawyers text back and forth.
Poor musicians don’t have those options.
When you take four, five or more extremely neurotic individuals and lock them in rooms together for thousands of hours, travel in vehicles with them and spend many more hours working into the night … a tension starts building.
You live through their personal dramas, put up with whoever they married or live with. Sorry, but you take a matching number of women who usually don’t know each other and shove them together … you’ll be fighting those fires without stop.
Which gets us to the last days of the band Starchild.
Which leads to the Pelican Inn.
The band had lately been going through the typical death throes. Our second guitar player, John “Lizard” Erikson, a replacement himself, had just been fired by me. He was a brilliant, flashy showman … when he was halfway sober … and a favorite of the audience.
The problem is, he loved drugs more than music, especially heroin. During breaks, he would go out into the parking lot and indulge himself. He would make it through three sets, but rarely the last.
One night, while playing a blistering solo, rocking back and forth, he suddenly fell backward into the drums, knocking them everywhere. He lay there in the wreckage. He never missed a note. The crowd thought it was part of the show and cheered him on. Enough was enough. We were done with Lizard.
Then the bass player, an original member of the band, got mad that we had fired his buddy and quit. We scrambled to get replacements and ended up with some “not ready for prime time” players to try and salvage our house band job.
It did not work. Starchild was a teetering wreck, and we got fired.
The only available gig was a hotel bar farther north in Fort Pierce, Florida, called the Pelican Inn, what I now refer to as the hospice for dying bands.
The Pelican had been a luxury three-story hotel in the 1920s that was frequented by movie stars and celebrities, right on the Intracoastal Waterway. A totally wooden building that over the years had deteriorated into a little slice of the ghetto.
During Prohibition, the boat docks served well for rum smugglers. Drug dealers and prostitutes later used it as a headquarters. At least, when we were there.
Someone had, at some point, decided to paint the entire interior with cheap white paint using spray equipment, leaving big white drips covering rotten wood. They painted the rooms, including the furniture and beds. Many of the room doors had been kicked in by police or bad guys and patched up.
We were all given rooms to stay in, and the white-painted bedside tables were handy for laying your gun on while you tried to sleep. That was difficult, since the night was full of the sounds of the pimps disciplining their “employees.”
The bar and our tiny stage were downstairs off the lobby. As you can guess, the “audience” was a mishmash of scurrilous-looking characters, mostly narcotics salespeople, inexpensive “escorts” and just genuinely criminal-looking folk.
One of the band members complained to the manager about the abundance of roaches in his room, so a pest control guy was sent for. He showed up with a large sprayer of roach poison and did the entire hotel and all the bedrooms.
Unfortunately, our drummer, Jim McVeigh, had gone upstairs to take a nap. The bug man sprayed massive amounts in the room while he slept.
When he woke up, he stumbled down the hall to the massive 1920s staircase — there was no elevator — and promptly fell down two flights of stairs, knocking himself out cold. He was taken to the nearest hospital, surviving but in no shape to play that night.
I found myself standing at the microphone before the first set of the night, asking the small group of derelicts, “Does anyone here play drums?”
A guy stepped forward and filled in for the night. He actually wasn’t bad.
But that was the end of my having to replace musicians for a dying band.
And Starchild had no pulse.
Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
